Weronika Tupaj, BA History of Art with Cultural Studies

The End of Utopia? The Emergence of Modernism in Nowa Huta – Socrealist Ideal City

My project is a study of the style of ‘Swedish House’ – a block of flats built in Poland in 1956, the year of a political thaw. It was erected in Nowa Huta – an ‘ideal city’ for the new working class built from scratch by Communist government. My research investigates why in the construction of ‘Swedish House’ socrealism, the style previously dominating in Nowa Huta, became replaced with modernism. The reasons of this change are found at different levels of social life of that time: episodes from everyday functioning of the city, but also new tendencies in national cultural policy.